Unreleased George Bohannon being released by Motown on 12/18

[johnny_raven]

... mp3 download only.

http://www.amazon.com/Motown-Unrelea...eywords=motown

[calvin]

This is great, I hope it also appears on Amazon UK so I can download it from here.

I wish Universal would do more of this. I guess I understand why they don't release physical cds for some titles, as they probably wouldn't sell enough to recoup their investment. But why not offer downloads of LPs like the Twistin' Kings, The Gospel Stars, Rev. Columbus Mann... I'd certainly rather buy an official release, even if only a download, than a vinyl rip from Hallmark.

And how about making some of the out-of-print cds [[example: Smokey Robinson & The Miracles, "What Love Has Joined Together") available as mp3 downloads? Just as they are, without further remastering, as an alternative to buying extremely expensive used copies?

Anyway, this looks good and I think it's a promising development!

[RossHolloway]

Excellent! I've always been fascinated by the jazz material since hearing some songs from TCMS. This is really exciting and hopefully a sign of more good things to come.

[kenneth]

This is great news, but I would still hope it might also come on CD. If not, maybe it will be my first download purchase ever.

[RossHolloway]

@Kenneth - If downloads are the wave of the future then I'm all in. If they can find a way to make the album cover and liner notes downloadable as well by pdf that would be awesome as well. I'm a fanatic when it comes to writer and producer credits, I love that stuff.

[kenneth]

@Kenneth - If downloads are the wave of the future then I'm all in. If they can find a way to make the album cover and liner notes downloadable as well by pdf that would be awesome as well. I'm a fanatic when it comes to writer and producer credits, I love that stuff.

I was wondering about that as well. A set like this you'd really want to have the notes.

Most classical sets now you have to download any extensive notes via PDF. A lot of soundtracks released by Film Score Monthly, such as a recent 5-CD set of the "Ben Hur" soundtrack also has extensive track annotations which are only available via download.

The problem becomes where to keep all the lists and all; of course I prefer the booklets coming with the CDs. But as you say about the general trend towards downloading music, it seems to be the wave of the future.

If it makes more music available which we wouldn't have otherwise, I'm all for it as well even though I'm a latecomer to the digital download!

[fatmaninthethirdrow]

I was wondering about that as well. A set like this you'd really want to have the notes.

Most classical sets now you have to download any extensive notes via PDF. A lot of soundtracks released by Film Score Monthly, such as a recent 5-CD set of the "Ben Hur" soundtrack also has extensive track annotations which are only available via download.

The problem becomes where to keep all the lists and all; of course I prefer the booklets coming with the CDs. But as you say about the general trend towards downloading music, it seems to be the wave of the future.

If it makes more music available which we wouldn't have otherwise, I'm all for it as well even though I'm a latecomer to the digital download!

Try googling Motown Unreleased in Amazon and just MARVEL AT WHAT ELSE IS PROMISED FOR THE SAME DATE....it's worth shouting about!

[theboyfromxtown]

OMG Did I really see what I just saw!

[booty]

SIX TITLES!!!

search on amazon.co.uk "Motown Unreleased"

Includes unreleased Gospel & Workshop Jazz titles from 1962

[honest man]

John please tell me what you really saw,

[theboyfromxtown]

Andy

Go to Amazon.co.uk

Search for Motown unreleased in ALL departments

You should get some mp3 titles - in fact, 6 albums worth of unreleased material by the likes of the Contours, Freddie Gorman, Hattie Littles, Vandellas, Marvin Gaye....and so on

[honest man]

Andy

Go to Amazon.co.uk

Search for Motown unreleased in ALL departments

You should get some mp3 titles - in fact, 6 albums worth of unreleased material by the likes of the Contours, Freddie Gorman, Hattie Littles, Vandellas, Marvin Gaye....and so on

WOWEE THANK YOU JOHN,I NEED GUYS AND GALS . Cheers.

[RossHolloway]

Are we being PUNKED? This just seems too good to be true!

And is anyone else surprised to see unreleased tracks by both Marvin Gaye and the Temptations?

[hwume]

This is real. Merry Christmas, et al, and enjoy.

[honest man]

This is real. Merry Christmas, et al, and enjoy.

great stuff my bung has banged ,serious though i have never dowloaded digital from Amazon ETC, how do you get songs to cd,pardon my inexperience, cheers.

[jboy88]

What i'd like to know is if it'll be on I-Tunes?

[RossHolloway]

What i'd like to know is if it'll be on I-Tunes?

I searched for them on ITunes earlier and did not see the titles listed anywhere.

[RossHolloway]

This is real. Merry Christmas, et al, and enjoy.

HW - Thank you, thank you, thank you. This is very exciting. Question: why start with the year 1962?

[Roger Polhill]

I`m fizzing at the bung.Who recently posted that there was not much left in the vaults? This is only for 1962 and most of these tracks have never been mentioned before.
I have lists of "assigned" tracks and only 2 or 3 of these sides are on the lists.
Christmas will be coming early this year.

[justanothermotownfan]

Thanks harry!!! Finally some workshop jazz!!!!

[Calv1971]

great stuff my bung has banged ,serious though i have never dowloaded digital from Amazon ETC, how do you get songs to cd,pardon my inexperience, cheers.

I am the same as you Honest Man, have never done a download before and wouldn't have a clue what to do!
This is fabulous news but would sooner pay that bit more and get proper CD releases

[144man]

I don't know how to do it either.

I also wonder how we make sure we don't miss any of the releases.

[kenneth]

Try googling Motown Unreleased in Amazon and just MARVEL AT WHAT ELSE IS PROMISED FOR THE SAME DATE....it's worth shouting about!

Wow! Unbelievable! Well, I guess my mind's been made up for me...I'll have to purchase all these via download.

What a find! Thanks!

[Calv1971]

I don't know how to do it either.

I also wonder how we make sure we don't miss any of the releases.

I think l shall on a regular basis type in "Unreleased Motown" in "All Departments" on Amazon to make sure nothing is missed, although any thing new that gets released, will be here on this Forum so nobody misses out.

[Roger Polhill]

Well done Fatman the best news possible - are you Santa ?

[justanothermotownfan]

Harry - will the original album artwork be available with this download and Johnny Griffith's?

[robb_k]

Amazing! Glad to see some cuts by The Pronouns coming out. But there are more. I've never seen any reference to The Mysterions. I'll be looking forward to hearing those. There are still hundreds of unreleased cuts left, including several artists that have seen no releases yet. Edward Earling is one, He sang some nice 1961-63 Eddie Holland type songs.

[snakepit]

great stuff my bung has banged ,serious though i have never dowloaded digital from Amazon ETC, how do you get songs to cd,pardon my inexperience, cheers.

Honest Man
I'm in the same boat as you, buy my brother in law has confirmed it can be done. When he shows me how to download and copy to CD-R I'll post some notes for you

[thommg]

Honest Man
I'm in the same boat as you, buy my brother in law has confirmed it can be done. When he shows me how to download and copy to CD-R I'll post some notes for you

Burning to a cd should be an option in your music program. You create a playlist [[just put all the mp3s from the album into the playlist, then burn the playlist to a cd). I have a Zune [[stop laughing) and the program for that allows me to just drag the entire album into a list area and then has the option to burn to disc. I thought it might be a convoluted process but it's pretty simple.

[robb_k]

Nice to see that there are several cuts from The Creations and Freddie Gorman that I hadn't heard in "The Vaults". There were CDs listed for "1962 Motown Unreleased": Guys Vol. 1 and Vol. 2, but no CDs for "Girls". I wonder why?

[robb_k]

It seems that we can't hear the snippets until the Dec. 14th release date. Is that right? Or have some of you heard them already?

[fatmaninthethirdrow]

Nice to see that there are several cuts from The Creations and Freddie Gorman that I hadn't heard in "The Vaults". There were CDs listed for "1962 Motown Unreleased": Guys Vol. 1 and Vol. 2, but no CDs for "Girls". I wonder why?

Well, you mention the Martha tracks on another thread and you obviously missed the Girls CD Listing on Amazon .

Loadsa Hattie Littles in there too.

Maybe some more you never came across at Motown?

[RossHolloway]

Nice to see that there are several cuts from The Creations and Freddie Gorman that I hadn't heard in "The Vaults". There were CDs listed for "1962 Motown Unreleased": Guys Vol. 1 and Vol. 2, but no CDs for "Girls". I wonder why?

Robb_k - if you go to Amazon UK and search Unreleased Motown than you will see the set for the "Girls", but it does not show up in Amazon for the US.

[Kamasu_Jr]

Amazing! Glad to see some cuts by The Pronouns coming out. But there are more. I've never seen any reference to The Mysterions. I'll be looking forward to hearing those. There are still hundreds of unreleased cuts left, including several artists that have seen no releases yet. Edward Earling is one, He sang some nice 1961-63 Eddie Holland type songs.

I wonder how the Pronouns unreleased gospel recordings get issued and the Sons of Zion doesn't? Wilson Pickett came out of the Sons before he joined the Violionaires and the Falcons. The SONS were only Detroit's number one male quartet for years and they were definitely part of Motown Gospel in 1962. If it was a question of finding the guys, all that needed to be done was to ask. A few of them are still surviving.

[johnny_raven]

Ross, it's on the US site as well ... http://www.amazon.com/Motown-Unrelea...d+motown+girls

[kenneth]

I wonder how the Pronouns unreleased gospel recordings get issued and the Sons of Zion doesn't? Wilson Pickett came out of the Sons before he joined the Violionaires and the Falcons. The SONS were only Detroit's number one male quartet for years and they were definitely part of Motown Gospel in 1962. If it was a question of finding the guys, all that needed to be done was to ask. A few of them are still surviving.

I sure would love to hear anything with Wilson Pickett. I had no idea he was even in any gospel groups before joining the Falcons!

Regardless, these are great landmark releases which I can't wait to hear, so I'm not going to complain about what is or isn't included. If we show our support by buying these, I'm sure there will be more, and that seems to be the intent by the "year by year" type designation in the titles.

[carole cucumber]

This is great, I hope it also appears on Amazon UK so I can download it from here.

I wish Universal would do more of this. I guess I understand why they don't release physical cds for some titles, as they probably wouldn't sell enough to recoup their investment. But why not offer downloads of LPs like the Twistin' Kings, The Gospel Stars, Rev. Columbus Mann... I'd certainly rather buy an official release, even if only a download, than a vinyl rip from Hallmark.....

Like others who have posted, I'm gleefully surprised and grateful. Thank you, Harry.
But I wonder ... all tracks available on December 18 are from 1962. This would be the next year that Hallmark in the U.K. would have available to re-issue [[bootleg) cd's of early Motown albums that are in public domain until the amended copyright laws take effect. Perhaps Motown/UMG is using this opportunity to send a message to Hallmark and other possible manufacturers- and to beat them at their own game, by offering what bootleggers cannot access.

Let's see..... now how many Cellarful's do these tracks equal??

[carole cucumber]

Harry,
On The Guys Vol 2, is Oh Mother of Mine an alternate take? The same for You've Got To Pay Bills? After checking CFTMC, I realize that You've Got To Pay Bills is likely version 1.

[radionixon]

Is it possible to change the thread title? The sheer scale of all this unreleased '62 stuff deserves the widest possible publicity, and - with the greatest respect to Mr Bohan[[n)on - I'd possibly not have clicked this if it wasn't mentioned in the separate Vandellas thread that there was more to it than George.

[radionixon]

If we show our support by buying these, I'm sure there will be more, and that seems to be the intent by the "year by year" type designation in the titles.

Gosh, I hadn't considered that! I'd love it if that was the case, but if so, why start with 1962 rather than 1959 - is 1962 just the first year where there's a significant amount of "new" stuff left in the vaults...?

Either way, I'll be buying the lot, no sense looking such a beautiful gift horse in the mouth.

[robb_k]

Gosh, I hadn't considered that! I'd love it if that was the case, but if so, why start with 1962 rather than 1959 - is 1962 just the first year where there's a significant amount of "new" stuff left in the vaults...?

Either way, I'll be buying the lot, no sense looking such a beautiful gift horse in the mouth.

1962 was probably the first year to have a decent crop of still-unreleased recordings that Universal probably thinks would interest enough buyers. 1959-61 has less, but, possibly enough to make a few nice mixed artist CDs [[rather than 2-3 artist CDs).

I can't wait for 1963, so maybe we can hear those "album's worth of still-unreleased cuts" from Linda Griner!

[lakedistrictlad1]

It is indeed fantastic to see these titles being made available - but I have one major gripe - and this is not directed merely toward Universal but to the industry as a whole -
Why oh why oh why do they not give purchasers the options of downloading 'lossless' [[flac or ape) files as opposed to just mp3? If I am buying music that is only available via download and not physical cd, then I want the best possible sound. Mp3 is not the best.
Considering the fact that many 1000's of blog sites out there that host lossless music files [[legalities aside) then can't see why the industry can't do the same.

[RossHolloway]

Does anyone have any experience using Amazon Cloud? The site says the sound quality is upgraded to 256Kbps audio. Does anyone know exactly what that means?

[theboyfromxtown]

Uptight will know the answer to that. I'll ask him to explain these technicalities

[calvin]

Does anyone have any experience using Amazon Cloud? The site says the sound quality is upgraded to 256Kbps audio. Does anyone know exactly what that means?

mp3 is a format in which the music is compressed, in a way that some information is lost [[a "lossy" format). This is done to reduce the file size, especially for the sake of being able to save more music on portable players which don't have a lot of memory. "kbps" is kilobits per second, the rate of music information during playback. The lower this number, the more the music is compressed, so the smaller the file size for that music, but generally speaking the sound quality gets worse as this number gets smaller. 320 kbps is the highest bit rate for mp3 that I know of, 256 is pretty good. These mp3 files have been compressed to whatever bit rate they are for these downloads, we can't improve the quality.

The cloud service is primarily for portable devices [[such as a smartphone) which enables you to access your music without needing to save it on your device. It seems that Amazon UK has been trying to promote their cloud service lately, so I think they put your files into the cloud by default when you buy them. But you can download the files directly to your home computer, and this is what I'll do.

[calvin]

It is indeed fantastic to see these titles being made available - but I have one major gripe - and this is not directed merely toward Universal but to the industry as a whole -
Why oh why oh why do they not give purchasers the options of downloading 'lossless' [[flac or ape) files as opposed to just mp3? If I am buying music that is only available via download and not physical cd, then I want the best possible sound. Mp3 is not the best.
Considering the fact that many 1000's of blog sites out there that host lossless music files [[legalities aside) then can't see why the industry can't do the same.

Yes I'm totally with you on this. For home use, memory is cheap - you can buy a 2 TB external hard drive for about £70 these days, so why should I care about saving space if I'm going to lose some quality? Even smartphones are coming with 16 GB memory these days [[with options to upgrade to 32), and one can put a few dozen cds compressed with lossless flac onto such a device.

Your point is especially valid when you don't have the choice between a physical cd or a lossy download.

I have seen some smaller music labels that offer lossless flac downloads, but Amazon and/or the major labels don't seem to care about this. It probably doesn't help either that microsoft and apple both have their own lossless formats that they try to promote - so neither natively plays some other lossless formats, like flac.

But this is a general issue, not specific to these recordings. And dare I say it here? The sound quality of the early Motown recordings was not really state of the art, so I think the difference between lossless and lossy will not be great in this case.

I'm very grateful to the team at Universal for making these available, and I do hope that they sell enough of these downloads to make more releases possible.

[lakedistrictlad1]

I'm very grateful to the team at Universal for making these available, and I do hope that they sell enough of these downloads to make more releases possible.[/QUOTE]

I'm grateful too Calvin - and can't wait to buy all of the series of 6 sets - but I really hope the download only scenario does NOT become the norm. I'll stay with cd releases that I can rip to lossy myself thanks.

[calvin]

Lakedistrictlad, I agree with you on lossy downloads. But let's face it, these releases will only appeal to a very limited number of people and perhaps they're only able to offer this if they can keep the production costs down, meaning no physical cds and download-only over Amazon. And unfortunately lossless downloads are simply not standardly available, and not at all on Amazon, as far as I know. Though perhaps that will change one day...

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencete...ty-iTunes.html

I'd buy lossless in this case if it were available, but I guess it's less important to me. I view this as a glass 99% full rather than 1% empty. The alternative to getting the music this way might be not getting it at all.

Maybe Harry or someone else at Hip-O can tell us why they decided on download only for these releases? [[Or did I miss this in another thread?)